Techland responds to "Feminist Whore" skill in early Dead Island code

Fresh issues have appeared in Dead Island's problematic launch, which has already been marred by the fact that Techland apparently distributed an incomplete, buggy version of their game through Steam. Now Duncan Harris points us to a post on the Steam forums where a Aleksei Vasiliev spotted that the mistakenly released code contained a skill called 'Feminist Whore'.

The name is not visible in the game itself, but can be seen in the file structure within Data0.pak\Data\default_player_setup.scr

sub Skills_Purna(){

Skill("TeamSpirit1Purna");

Skill("SharpApprenticePurna");

[...]

Skill("TeamSpirit2Purna");

Skill("FeministWhorePurna");

Skill("MeleeDurabilityPurna");

[...]

}

Brand Manager Blazej Krakowiak told Eurogamer that "It obviously violates professional and ethical standards at Techland and should never have happened." He apologised for the incident and said that they were "Investigating this right now and we'll issue a statement later.

Dead Island's launch has already been difficult, with the version initially available on Steam appearing to be an early development build. Publishers Deep Silver previously made a statement to ArsTechnica regarding the mistake, saying, "We deeply regret that an incorrect version of Dead Island was inadvertently made available to players on Steam launch in North America."

A follow up statement to CVG says that the full version will be sent out shortly. To say sorry, "Deep Silver plans to announce a 'make up' to North American fans who were affected by the day 1 PC issues." Deep Silver don't say what the "make up" will be. Electrified katanas for all?

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Tom stopped being a productive human being when he realised that the beige box under his desk could play Alpha Centauri. After Deus Ex and Diablo 2 he realised he was cursed to play amazing PC games forever. He started writing about them for PC Gamer about six years ago, and is now UK web ed.